Saying Good-bye to Our Yellow House

I have been waiting to announce this until everything was officially official-I'm just superstitious! This week we closed on a new home and sold our beautiful Yellow Meadowbrook House. This is has been a long process that began with us going to an open house on a whim one Sunday in early April (yes! April! ...what a long process!) 

We've always dreamed of moving to the small town that I grew up in that is about half an hour from where the Yellow House is. My parents and sister and her family live there and the schools are wonderful. With our oldest going into Kindergarten in a year, schools are a big consideration. Proximity to my family is a huge plus, as well as all the family friendly activities the community has. We can walk to just about everything!

That being said, we left behind a wonderful neighborhood in "the city."  We were close to an amazing park that made you feel like you were in the country. We had wonderful neighbors. We had just about any take-out food available until all hours of night (thanks to being so close to a major University) We had planned to have our kids start school and stay in the neighborhood a few more years. We were very happy.

We also had just gotten the house to (almost) what we wanted it to be. I still wanted my little white picket fence for the front yard and to pull up the hallway carpet and restore the original hardwoods beneath. Heck, we were in the midst of three kind of big projects when we went to the open house! (Mudroom, laundry room, and bathroom updates! I never even blogged about the laundry room!) We were not expecting to move, but the house we saw seemed just like home. We could see raising the kids there. Not to mention, it was an amazing deal. The timing was right to both buy a house (interest rates expected to go up soon) and to sell our house (the market we were in was HOPPING!)

So we made an offer and I began the three months of randomly starting to sob. I love that little house so much. We moved there in our first year of marriage. First dog. First baby. Second baby. I'm kind of sobbing right now writing this. I guess to some people a house is "just a house." But we put our blood, sweat, and tears into that house. And so much paint. So much. My mom says that I put my heart into it and left a little piece of it there, and I agree. We will always have our memories, and we learned so much about what we could do ourselves to make a house a home. We took care of her, and she paid us back for all our hard work.

We scrambled to wrap up our projects. We purged a little. We scrubbed a lot. The house looked amazing. We listed on April 27th first thing in the morning and had a viewing that morning. We had a full price offer that afternoon, and another the following day. We were grateful to have a quick sale. Our realtor kept saying it was due to my "staging" which kind of bothered me-no it really bothered me-because more or less the house was just picked up and clean but otherwise how it looked every day. I would hate to have anyone think that what they were seeing wasn't how we lived normally. Or that we were some kind of house flippers. Everything we did was for our family, to make the house work best for us, to restore and revive it. I think the kitchen design was a big factor. Oh man, do I miss my dream kitchen. 

Then came the process of getting our house completely ready to close. We had a list of requests from the buyer, including completing the house painting. The bank for our new house also had a little list and wanted paint fixed, which we opted to do ourselves to save us and our seller some money. Cue me and my dad donning our painting clothes for what seemed like two months. If you had told me in January that I would be paining not one house, but two, by June I would have said you're CRAZY. But we did it. We had to hire a painter to help get some really hard to reach places on the Yellow House, and did everything ourselves on the Red House. The month of May I dreamed at night about scraping chipping and peeling paint. 

So the Red House is our new house. We started referring to the houses by their colors to help our son (4 years old) begin to understand that we were moving. He had a little heartbreak about leaving the Yellow House, and his buddies that live next door. When we told him we wanted a bigger house that was closer to Nana and Boppa he asked why we couldn't make the Yellow House bigger and move it. Trust me, buddy, I've considered it!! I think with the length of time it took to close...we had a 60 day close that turned into almost 90 for various reasons...he really had time to soak it in and when the time came to move he was ready. I'm glad to think that he'll remember his first house.

So...cheers to the Red House! and "fare thee well" to my sweet sweet little Yellow House....<SOB>

Me hugging my house good-bye and saying thank you. This was an hour before the buyer's final walk through, and after seven hours of scrubbing and cleaning and patching and painting. I will love you forever, little house. Shine on!

The Red House in April.

Home Sweet Home, built in 1826!

xoxo

jamie